Requiem for Sanskrit

Abstract

currents currOTs* Requiem for Sanskrit WillisGothRegier TheClay SanskritLibrarypowerfully affirms Sanskrit's contributionsto world literature, ethics,and religion. Had John Clay beenable tosee theseriesto its goal, English readers would havefound the way toSanskritliterature pavedfor them with handsomebooksbound inemeraldblue.Regret for thecloseofthe CSL will grow as rapidlyas the gratitude for itsachievements. There are a thousand paths to Indian lit erature, some of them new and gleaming. India's diaspora has produced much of thebest of currentEnglish fiction.Salman Rushdie is a hero of our time;Arundhati Roy writes with nectars and rain;Vikram Seth runs throughgenres likea fox throughhedgerows. JhumpaLahiriwon the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies. The 2008 Booker Prize went toAravid Ariga's The White Tiger. Some paths are old as the ocean. Smack in themiddle of The White Tiger, Ariga's narrator views the Bhagavad Gita in the streetlights of modern Delhi. Seth's Beastly Tales borrows from Vishnusharman's Panchatantra. For decades John Barth encouraged readers to read Somadeva's The Ocean of the Rivers ofStory,a Sanskrit storycollec tion thatmakes theArabian Nights look parched. Until recently,The Ocean's 350 tales were hard to find in English. The only available English translationwas printed in India on brittlepaper ineye-straining type. In 2007 Sir JamesMallinson published the firstvolume of his translation of The Ocean. That volume announced eight more to come, to arrive in tarangas, or "waves," as part of amajor new venture, theClay Sanskrit Library (hereafter CSL). I \ * Some paths suddenly stop partway to their goal. For amoment the sun shone brightlyon the CSL. A project of passion, itgrew rapidly under the tender supervision of itspatron, JohnClay. Clay intended todo forSanskritwhat JamesLoeb did forGreek and Latin: make major and minor classics available in affordable formats,with the original language on the leftpage and a reliable translationon the right.Launched in2004 byNew York University Press, and originally planned to run one hundred volumes, theproject proved too expensive foritspatron and isnow staggering toa close farshortof its target. What happened? The sagging economy didn't help, screenmedia (theveil ofMaya triumphant) are everywhere invincible, and Sanskrit literature 38 i World Literature Today V leftAsking Her to Leave HerNoisy AnkletsBehind and Go. Folio from a Gita Govinda series by Manaku of Guler. Opaque watercolor, gold, and beetle-wing carapaces on paper. Reproduced courtesy of the San Diego Museum ofArt/EdwinBinney 3rd Collection. See Song 11 of the Gita Govinda: "Take them off your noisy anklets;/suchjingling betrays a trysting lover" (excerpted on page 40). has barriers of its own. Its hyperbolic tenden cies are an acquired taste. Its complex meters, compound nouns, epithets, and wordplay do not translate easily. It is crowded with contend ing supreme gods and stuffedwith moralizing speeches. In several places the Mah?bh?rata com mends study of theVedas, yet inanother declares no one understands them. An ever-rising flood of Bhagavad Gitas blocks theway toeverything else. But themost obvious troublewith Sanskrit literature is that there is somuch of it. Its great est epic, theMah?bh?rata, has defied translators because of itsgirth: something of a libraryunto itself, itbuilds slowly, detours to a plethora of satellite stories,and culminates in world war. Clay expected to complete it in thirty-two volumes. He planned to complete India's other great epic, the R?m?yana, in seven. In addition, Sanskrit literature boasts plays, fables, romances, adventure tales, love poetry,riddles, satires,and collections of epi grams.Where tobegin? The CSL took the firststep, identifying what is most worth reading, and the second step, transliteratingSanskrit's strange scripts into the Roman alphabet. It took the third step, translat ing the texts into plain English, hyperboles and all, and the fourth, providing introductions toput texts intocontext and notes to identify names and explain allusions. Clay was frustratedby thepace of progress: himself fightinga crippling disease, he originally planned to complete the ioo-volume libraryby March-April 2009 i39 Willis Goth Regier is Director of the University of Illinois Press. He isthe author of Book of the Sphinx(2004) and InPraise ofFlattery (2007),bothpub lished bytheUniversity of Nebraska Press. His articles and reviews have appeared inFrench Forum, Language, Modern Language Notes, Prairie Schooner, the Chron icle of Higher Education, the Baltimore Sun...